Can your earliest childhood memory effect the person you become? Mine seems to creepily suit my kitsch niche.

I've lived in Bangor, Northern Ireland most of my life, but for my first two years I lived on the Castlereagh Road in Belfast.

I have no memories of the house, inside or out, but I've watched hours of video of myself as a baby. My dad bought one of the first home video cameras, a giant thing complete with bulky machine to plug into, this was 1980.

I've watched myself sitting in a high chair, listening to the entirety of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds- which explains why I've always found it so bloody terrifying!

Its not that that springs up as my only memory of life on Castlereagh Road, and therefore my earliest. I remember being taken on walks a number of houses down, to look at a neighbour's front garden, which was decorated with dozens of little garden gnomes.

Gnomes are one of the symbols of kitsch, which seems spooky given my blog now, and how I choose to decorate my home and the things I love in life.

So that's my history, but what of the history of the garden gnome? This info graph from Museum Selection plots their path to our gardens, from 19th centuary Germany.

Gnomes are one of the top ten answers that pop up when you ask the general public what a kitsch item is to them. Weirdly though I don't feature them on www.TheWorldofKitsch.com often. Why? I don't know, I just don't like them. I think they are tacky in a bad way.

I mean I have plastic lawn flamingoes, and they aren't exactly middle class norms, but I just don't like gnomes. The front garden needed a little spruce up and something new, so I've ordered an ornamental fox on Museum Selection, which I will blog about when he arrives.

Until then how would you like to win your own ornamental hare for your grassy patch? It's a little different from a guard dog.

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